(Never fails to bring tears of rejoicing to my eyes…)
Y’know what? It’s pretty easy to get demoralized by the news. I mean, it’s one damned thing after another, all of it awful, a never-ending freak show: like the report today about the 22-year-old nut in Los Angeles who wants to be “a genderless alien or extraterrestrial” and has had over 100 plastic surgery procedures toward that end ( http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-4274396/Man-spends-50-000-transform-genderless-ALIEN.html ). Look at the mess he’s made of himself!
But we ought to remember that that’s the nature of the news.
A thousand cats sitting on a thousand people’s laps, that’s not news, it would never be reported. One cat going mad and biting off Grandma’s tongue–that’s news, and it will be reported everywhere.
The news is about deviations from the norm, the more deviant, the better. Ordinary people doing ordinary things, with ordinary results, is not news. Okay, a local weekly reporting the youth league soccer scores, that’s pretty normal–and as the guy whose job once included getting that stuff into the paper, I’m here to tell you that they’d tar and feather you if you ever left it out.
It’s not that the news reports we read, and get distressed by, are fictional–although some of it is, and more than is good for us. We do have to pay heed to what’s happening. A lot of it is bad. A lot of it, we would stop if we could.
But we mustn’t let ourselves be freaked out by it. (“I plead guilty, your honor…”) Accepting that it’s bad news, resolved to do what good we can, there’s still one thing we must always remember:
Our God is an awesome God!
That’s the problem with news as a money-making business. The bizarre will always win out, because bizarre things attract viewers. Approaching 20 years ago, I gave up on TV news. I just seemed like a big dramatic production to me and had little to do with informing anyone.
Since that time, things have only gotten worse, with regard to news. Integrity, honesty and reliability are obsolete, in the news business, these days. Now we have intentionally false stories being published.
However, there is one thing that all of us can do, which is 100% legal and 100% effective. Don’t watch the news on TV, don’t listen to the news on radio and don’t read the newspaper. There are hundreds of Internet news sources and you can make the choice between them, based upon your opinion regarding their reliability.
If a substantial portion of the population quit watching TV news, their advertising revenue will fall and soon they will be out of business. Likewise for radio and print news sources. Many think that the news has become a beast that is uncontrollable, but it can be starved into submission and, actually, I think that is happening already to some degree.
Look at Target; they’ve dug in their heels with a liberal agenda and now they are facing a 43% drop in their profits, even though Walmart, their chief competitor, is suffering no such fate. Eventually, Target’s stockholders will demand new leadership and the people that promoted their liberal agenda will be out of the picture. The same can happen to news media, and I won’t lose any sleep if it does.
Amen, Unknowable! Well said! And much of what’s ‘reported’ is propaganda/spin anyway. The lame stream media’s agenda is to spoon feed us only what they wish us to know or think. You’re so right – starve the beast.
Thanks for this praise song, Lee. It’s one of my favorites!
Soldiers of the Lion is another one – Chuck Girard
News is certainly a misnomer these days. I can faintly remember when there really was some truth in what we heard as news, but that was long ago. Our God is an awesome God– now that is what I enjoy hearing.